Cutting your lighting bill by 90%...
...as easy as changing a lightbulb? Switching your household bulbs to LEDs and cutting your lighting bill by 90% couldn’t be easier according to an article by The Guardian’s Patrick Collinson on 19th January, 2019. Is this too good to be true? For many people, the answer is yes.
We took a closer look at the claims being made, and while the benefits to switching to LEDs can generate savings of 80-90% to your lighting bill over time, some statements in Collinson’s article scan be easily misinterpreted in terms of making the switch. However, what can’t be argued with is the collective reduction in energy consumption for Britain’s 25m homes (estimated at £2bn) and stopping millions of tonnes (estimated at 8m) of CO2 entering the atmosphere.
The article introduces Rodney Birks, a retired engineer, who has replaced the 40 bulbs in his home with low-energy dimmable LEDs and has paid 92p each for the bulbs. He calculates that lighting made up 18% of his electricity bill, now reduced to just 1.8% or £14 per year. At a glance, the numbers are impressive, but let’s be clear, the 90% saving is on the proportion of the electricity bill for lighting – not the whole electricity bill. The saving he makes is still worth having but maybe not savings of the scale you might have thought when reading the article. To read our other ‘mythbusting’ points about switching to LEDs, you can request a copy of the full text (with a link to Collinson’s original article) by emailing us using the Contact Us form or reading our Facebook Note of the same title.
Households, in the long term, have no choice but to switch to LEDs following the EU announcement to ban the sale of halogen bulbs back in September 2018. So, there are great - but not unrealistic - reasons and benefits for switching as soon as you can. For more information about the benefits, and options available, to improve your lighting, talk to us… because there’s more to light!
